The cedar model of the House for the Poem of the Right Angle was first displayed in 2010 at the ‘Global Ends’ exhibition at the Ma Gallery in Tokyo. Its environment owes a lot to this picture and also to our installation in Venice, ‘The Boy Hidden in a Fish’: an opaque reinforced concrete exterior; a quiet, fragrant cedar interior.
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CONTEXT
In picture C.3, found in the section on Flesh in Le Corbusier’s ‘The Poem of the Right Angle’, the viewer occupies the body of a man lying in an ambiguous interior. He seems to be looking at an interior landscape where a woman is peering out towards an opening that reveals a passing cloud. We can see the man’s feet and a menhir, which is probably his erect penis. This area is covered by a hand placed dome-shaped on the whole lithograph, which increases the sense of an interior or a cavern.
PERFORMANCE
This house is the latest refuge that we have built. Its structure is a regular 12 cm thick reinforced concrete vault with a span of up to 15 m, resting on the perimeter walls. The vault is cut irregularly around its perimeter, with an open courtyard left inside. This blind volume faces a privileged mountain landscape, encrusted in an oak forest and hemmed in by an artificial garden containing 300 basalt stones. Its enclosure shows that its inhabitants are familiar with the surroundings —like the familiarity of a farmer, a hobo or a monk— ‘naturally’. There was a large log cabin with six bedrooms, four bathrooms, a living room, dining room and services. The volume was the result of constant extensions around a poor, humble wooden structure built 50 years ago. We wanted to go back to the beginning and return the calm lost by the land after being invaded by so much timber. We removed all the excess material —about 60% of the house— leaving the austere initial structure bare, beneath the trees. We painted it white and installed corrugated polycarbonate cladding. Alongside it we installed a scaffolding tower that feeds energy to this transparent ghost and the House for The poem of the right angle, located 60 metres away in the forest.
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PRIMARY AUTHOR
Smiljan Radic
CONTRIBUTING AUTHOR
Marcela Correa (Sculptor)
AUTHOR
Marcela Correa
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